Jonah Lehrer paid $20k to talk plagiarism

2/12/13 2:47 PM EST

Poynter reports that Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist who resigned from The New Yorker last year amid plagiarism charges, was paid $20,000 to speak publicly about his dishonesty at a Knight Foundation event today in Miami.

“Like most outside speakers at Knight events, he was paid an honorarium. In this case, it was $20,000,” Knight spokesperson Marika Lynch told Poynter.

Lehrer's talk at the Knight Foundation was an extended apology, at which he admitted to and sought to identify the causes for his dishonesty,

“I’m the author of a book on creativity that contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes," he said. "I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett.”

Lehrer also said he would establish guidlines -- or, a "standard operating procedure" -- in order to avoid plagiarism in the future.

"I will restore the trust that I lost," Lehrer said at one point. "If I write again, then what I write will be fully fact-checked and footnoted."

That Lehrer was paid $20,000 to discuss his own failures was a source of frustration for journalists on Twitter and in off-the-record emails to this blog. One noted that many honest journalists tend to speak for free, while another pointed out that $20k is roughly half the annual salary for a journalist getting started in the business today.

Asked by one audience member if someone had given him "a good reason for making a public apology," Lehrer said that though he had apologized to others privately it was important to have this apology on the record, as a reminder.